


turn away from the sun

by neverlasting_legend (neverlasting)



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Casual Mentions of Death, Dark, F/M, Obsession, Power Imbalance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 15:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1904751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverlasting/pseuds/neverlasting_legend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your boy is a supernova/ Amorphous, ethereal, incandescent/ You are scared he will blind you/ Or burn you/ You know he will/ But you cannot turn away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	turn away from the sun

There’s something about this boy that marks him above the rest. 

He plays with the others – eats and laughs with them as if there is no difference but there is.  He’s  _more_  agile,  _more_  charismatic,  _more_  cunning.  He plays at being one of the Lost Boys but there is just something about him that is remarkably  _more_.

Wendy doesn’t quite understand it – doesn’t get it instinctively like the rest of boys do but it’s of no consequence.  The Lost Boys grow wary at any signs of rebellion or disrespect but Peter Pan delights in the brash and inquisitive nature of the girl.

“She’s got fire,” he says, all easy smirks and sharp eyes.  “We like fire now, don’t we boys?”

They all laugh and grin in agreement even though a scant few of them are still able to feel sympathy.

The girl is Pan’s new favorite plaything and they  _all_  know what happens to his favorites.

Wendy feels a flutter of fear in the pit of her stomach but brushes it off.

It was just her nerves trying to get the best of her.

.:.

Wendy is  _different_  – they learn. 

Not because she’s a girl – never because she’s a girl because there have been girls before her.  All soft and pretty and not worth even a blip on their leader’s radar.  Sometimes he had played with these girls too – allowed them into the Lost Boys’ little games.  The ones that didn’t run screaming or end up sobbing on the dirty Neverland floor sometimes even stayed a night or two around the campfire but they always went home in the end.

Well, home or dead.

But Wendy – Wendy is  _different_.  The Pan doesn’t just hoist her off to a Lost Boy to look after, he takes her around  _himself_.  Watches her like a hawk to make sure she doesn’t get pulled into Mermaid Lagoon or get captured by pirates.  She’s incredibly daft around these two creatures they learn – finding the women and men of the ocean too  _exciting_  to heed the Pan’s firm warnings of flesh-eating creatures and men with needs more dangerous than their blades.

There is a lot of blood washing on the shores of Neverland during her stay but astonishingly, she never sees.

The Pan is surprisingly delicate with the way he handles the girl.  He takes her hand as they make their way over stumps and roots.  He saves the best seat for her, next to him and closest to the fire at all times.  He holds her by the undersides of her knees with a firm arm cradling her back when he flies.  He even plays his pipes low and soothing outside the window of her treehouse when she has trouble sleeping.

It’s disturbing, if they are being honest, to see.

Some of the older boys think it’s funny – the ones that knew what came from the union of man and woman.  A couple of them had tumbled with a girl or two before Neverland.  There were even a few who had more than a few close encounters with the mermaids; they were usually handsome or at the very least, a bit  _pretty_  for the mermaids to consider risking their necks for a few moments of passion.  Even Felix, undoubtable the Pan’s most trusted, sporadically disappeared into the home of the island’s disgraced fairy.  It was really no guessing to why Captain Hook hated the boy as much as he detested Pan and the Lost Boy clearly returned the sentiment.

Felix didn’t think it was the same for Peter though.  He was the island’s favorite after all.  Mermaids would kill one of their own for a singly tryst with the Pan and God knew how many times Tinker Bell had simultaneously appreciated the lean form of the Island’s king and sneered at the wicked knowing in his eyes.

No, Felix didn’t think what Peter wanted with the bird girl was something that could be satisfied with a night in her house or against a tree.

.:.

Peter hates the bird girl as much as he is intrigued by her.  He loves her as well but if it outstrips both his hate and his interest, he doesn’t allow himself to say.

It’s easy for him to fall in love with her.  His heart is capricious and black as it may be, it still works.  He falls for her soft sighs and softer thighs and gentle hands and kind, bright smiles.  He feels his iron-clad hold on his emotions and kingdom become tenuous with each laugh that tumbles from her inviting lips and the way her eyes sparkle with adventure when she breathes, “ _Peter._ ”

Little Wendy Darling falls from the sky just a girl with girlish dreams and Peter Pan catches her like a demon reaching for light.

The girl is dim by the boys’ standards – doesn’t understand that things on Neverland may be beautiful but they are hardly ever kind.  He supposes he cannot blame her.  There are very few Lost Boys who came from homes at all and the ones that did, often came from homes so broken and dangerous that they wished they had lived on the streets. 

Wendy Darling, from what he understands from her memories and the way her lips curve into a loving smile, came from a whole family and Peter hates her for it.

Peter hates her because she thinks of the island as a game, and though he encourages that whimsy in his boys, it’s markedly different in this girl who treats her stay as a holiday vacation.

He tries to keep her – tries to make her think of Neverland –  _him_  as home.  She has two brothers she says.  Wouldn’t she like it if he brought them to stay?

She laughs, “John?  Heaven’s no.  Playing pirates is all fun in games but I think he’d faint in face of a real one.”  She looks up, her feet light as she walks the trunk of a fallen tree, “Perhaps Michael would like to visit… and Bae too if I can convince him.”

Visit.  He feels like pulling out his own teeth each time he tries and fails to get her to admit that Neverland is  _home._ He should just ask her out right, demand it out of her throat that she say she is here to stay because he is  _Peter Pan_  and Neverland is his domain.  He can  _make_  her stay if it comes down to it but he doesn’t want to.  He doesn’t want to command her loyalty – her  _love_.  He wants her to give it to him freely and without coercion.  He wants her to fall as in love – no,  _more_  in love with him than he is with her.

It’s maddening, obsessive, but he cannot stop himself.

He should kill her.  Let her die.  Let her go home.  Anything to get her to relinquish this hold she has on him but he cannot.

Her dead in his arms is enough to make him rage.  Her dead by his hand or his mechanisms makes him think of turning Neverland in and on itself – killing him and all the inhabitants that failed to stay his hand.  But her going home – growing up and growing  _old_  with another is what makes him fall to his knees.

He would pluck out her heart and strip her of the ability to feel before he’d see her love another.

She’s captured his heart and he will not stop until he has done the same to her.

.:.

Wendy is as afraid of Neverland as she is entranced.

She is not blind to its faults – cannot be no matter how much she wishes.  Neverland is a reflection of its ruler and if there’s anything she’s learn in the scant weeks she’s been here, is that there’s a darkness lurking underneath the smirks Peter wears so freely.

He hides it – hides it  _well,_  but there are times when he can’t completely mask the blackness of his heart – when he thinks she is not paying attention and when she gives him the illusion of being completely oblivious _._

She’s not stupid.  Wendy knows she is attracted to him in a way she has only felt in fleeting amounts with other boys her age before and that’s dangerous enough because Peter – Peter is  _not_  like other boys.

Peter is so much  _more_.

Peter Pan is amorphous, ethereal _, incandescent._

There is a greatness to him and a hunger behind it that frightens her more than she’d like to admit.   One that she sees present when he cuts down a pirate in front of her or when a mermaid is dashed upon the rocks when he thinks she is looking away.

He wants her to stay – asks her in not so many words and in the most indirect words he can manage.  He plays nonchalant when he does but his mannerisms belie his desire and his nervousness.

Wendy skirts around these questions with all the grace she can manage even when her heart jumps in fear when he  _graciously_  offers to bring her brothers.

Wendy would die first before she allowed any of her brothers be trapped here because there are truths now that she did not know before. 

Neverland is a prison.

She did not think it possible that this paradise could be seen as such but it is.  Peter is so gentle with her that it’s hard sometimes to look past his kindness to see that he doesn’t think twice to extend the same kindness to the boys in his charge. 

The younger ones – they cry constantly and frequently at night.  Lost souls calling for mothers and fathers that they hated and loved all the same.  Wendy thinks he is an expert at ignoring it, the cries having fallen deaf to his ears long ago but Wendy  _aches_  from the sound of it.  Peter may have placed a spell on her house so she could a peaceful night’s rest without the wailing but it does not change the fact that she stays up late with the knowledge of wailing boys.

In truth, it is this, not his discomforting cruelty that makes her eventually distance herself from the boy.

She smiles prettily for him the same as she does the other boys – curtsies and plays Mother to his Father just as she did from the start of her stay but keeps the affection she felt for him smothered.  She keeps her touches civil and does not sit as close as she did to him as she did before.  She takes his hand because is it practical and lets go when it is not.

She hopes to bore him with her distance, make him lose interest when there is no interest to be found but instead it drives him into a frenzy.

He doesn’t show it overtly, but the days come and go and as she takes step after step back from him and his allure, he drives closer and grasps onto her harder than before.  He becomes desperate to show her all the island has to give and offers her things that make her tremble in fear.

“We could be young forever.”  She doesn’t want to give up her future.

“I would give you the world.”  She just wants to go home.

Wendy Darling thinks that Peter Pan wants her to stay because she is a novelty.  She is something strange and different on this island where he controls all and he wants her affection wants her to be as in awe of him as the rest of his subjects.

She doesn’t know when he puts down all his cards and proves her wrong one night with a soft coaxing kiss before she has the chance to climb into her room.

Her palms sweat and her heart stutters and she kisses him back despite the part of her heart crying out  _no_  because the slide of their lips sounds like the clicking of a lock and she is lost.

She did not come to Neverland for love but Peter Pan captures her heart with his bone thin fingers like the bars of a cage.

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: “Your boy is a supernova/ Amorphous, ethereal, incandescent/ You are scared he will blind you/ Or burn you/ You know he will/ But you cannot turn away.” based on this poem.
> 
> a/n: for the RAD NEVERLANDER’S Sexy Secret Cupid. Hope you like, Albany <3
> 
> a/n ii: reposted from tumblr

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [turn away from the sun [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5370374) by [blackglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackglass/pseuds/blackglass)




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